The goal of agricultural production is to maximize profit. A major way to do this is to minimize production cost. There are many factors that influence production cost, such as agricultural output, employee cost, and energy costs. Throughout the years, agricultural output has been maximized using factors such as the amount of water received by the growing crop, the amount and type of fertilizer provided to the crop, the amount and type of herbicides and pesticides applied to the crop, etc. However, employee cost, arising from employee time, and energy costs have been difficult to balance.
Traditionally, harvesting was performed by an experienced operator, often having a personal stake in the productivity of the harvest. However, given the decline of traditional family owned and operated farms and the rise of outsourced harvesting, there has been a large decrease in the level of experience of the operators harvesting crops. In many of these situations, hired help is paid per acre. This leaves the operator with little incentive to maximize harvesting output or to minimize crop loss or energy consumption. Sadly, this leads to suboptimal harvesting and therefore wasted crops, wasted energy, or both.
For example, a grain combine is used to extract grain from a field, separating out the grain from the rest of the crop. As the grain combine moves through a grain field, the header cuts (in the case of small grains) or picks (in the case of corn) the crop as the grain combine passes through the field. The crop is then fed from the header into a separator. In the separator, the crop rubs between a rotor/cylinder and a concave in order to separate the grain from the remainder of the crop, the material other than grain (MOG). The grain that is separated from the crop along with fines generated from the separator is transferred to the cleaning system and the remaining plant residue is directed to the rear of the grain combine for discharge. The biomass residue mixed with the grain in the cleaning system is referred to as MOG. The cleaning system typically consists of one or more sieves and a cleaning fan. The separated grain is cleaned by passing it over one or more sieves while a fan blows up through or across the sieves separating the lighter MOG from the more dense grain. At this point, the grain falls through the sieves and is moved to the grain tank and the MOG is expelled out the back of the grain combine.
During the operation of the grain combine, there are various adjustments the operator can make to optimize the harvesting process. For example, the operator may control the ground speed, size of the sieve openings, the speed of said fan, the concave setting (the gap between the concave and the rotor/cylinder), rotor/cylinder speed, etc. A skilled operator may have some success optimizing some of these adjustments (settings) based on their experience and through trial and error. However, an unskilled operator or even a skilled operator operating a grain combine in an unfamiliar field or unfamiliar conditions, such as plant density or moisture, is ill-equipped to properly adjust these grain combine operating conditions. Furthermore, as the optimal adjustments will vary even within the same crop across a field, the operator must be able to dynamically adjust settings during a harvest. In many cases, due to the complexity and interaction of such adjustments, only the ground speed is altered if the operator determines that excess crop is being lost. Additionally, even if the operator could account for all of the changes during harvesting, constantly changing all of these adjustments would overly distract the operator from his primary concerns for proper grain combine operation and safety.
Therefore, there is a need to automatically adjust, as well as monitor, the systems and methods that operate within a grain combine such that the product yield is maximized.